How to Monster Crop: Cloning From Flowering Plants

Monster cropping is the practice of taking a cutting from a cannabis plant that is already in the flowering stage, rooting that cutting, and then reverting it back to vegetative growth under long-day lighting. The technique produces plants with unusually dense branching and multiple growth tips, which is the whole point. It sounds counterintuitive to clone a plant mid-flower, and the process does take longer and carry more risk than cloning a vegetative mother, but growers who pull it off are rewarded with naturally bushy plants that fill a canopy without heavy training.

Why Clone a Flowering Plant in the First Place

Most growers clone from a mother plant kept under vegetative lighting. That works perfectly well. Monster cropping exists for situations where you either don’t keep a dedicated mother or you’ve already flipped your best plant into flower and realize you want to preserve the genetics. Rather than losing that cultivar entirely, you snip a few lower branches, root them, and force them back into vegetative growth.

The real draw, though, is the growth pattern that emerges after reversion. When a flowering cutting reverts to vegetative growth, the plant doesn’t simply resume normal single-tip branching. Instead, it pushes out clusters of shoots from each node, creating a naturally bushy structure. Some growers describe the result as looking like the plant was topped multiple times without ever actually being cut. That branching habit means more bud sites later, and it happens on its own once the clone successfully reverts.

Choosing the Right Cutting

Timing matters. The sweet spot is roughly two to three weeks into the flowering cycle, once the plant has clearly transitioned and you can see small flower clusters forming at the nodes, but before the buds have packed on significant mass. Too early and the cutting hasn’t committed enough to flower for the reversion to produce that signature bushy growth. Too late and the cutting is so far into flower that it has trouble reverting at all, or the rooting process stalls because the plant’s energy is locked up in bud development.

When selecting which branch to cut, look at the lower canopy. Lower branches tend to be less developed in flower, which makes them easier to revert and more willing to root. They also aren’t doing much for the mother plant’s yield, so removing them costs you little. Choose a branch with at least two or three nodes and healthy leaf tissue. Avoid anything yellow, stressed, or heavily shaded to the point where the leaves are thin and pale.

Make a clean diagonal cut with a sterile blade just below a node. Some growers lightly scrape or split the bottom half-inch of the stem to expose more cambium tissue, which can help with root development. Immediately place the cut end in water or a rooting solution to prevent air from entering the stem’s vascular tissue.

Rooting the Cuttings

Flowering cuttings root more slowly than vegetative ones. Expect the process to take anywhere from two to four weeks, compared to the one to two weeks typical for vegetative clones. Patience is non-negotiable here. Many growers give up on monster crop clones too soon, assuming they’ve failed, when the cutting just needs more time.

You can root monster crop cuttings in any medium that works for regular clones: rockwool cubes, peat plugs, perlite, or even a glass of water. A humidity dome helps enormously, since the cutting has no roots and relies entirely on its leaves to absorb moisture from the surrounding air. Keep humidity high, around 80 to 90 percent, and mist the inside of the dome if it dries out.

Rooting hormones improve your odds. Research on rooting ornamental cuttings has shown that hormone concentrations just below the toxic threshold tend to produce the best rooting results, with indole-3-butyric acid (IBA) being one of the most widely used compounds across plant species.¹ For cannabis cuttings, commercial cloning gels and powders containing IBA at low to moderate concentrations are the standard. The key is not overdoing it. More hormone doesn’t mean faster roots; too much actually inhibits root development or kills the stem tissue outright.

Light during rooting should be gentle. Fluorescent or low-intensity LED lighting on an 18-hour or 24-hour schedule works well. You want enough light for the cutting to photosynthesize and stay alive, but not so much that it stresses the plant while it has no root system to support water uptake. Some growers keep cuttings under 24 hours of light from day one to immediately signal the shift away from the flowering photoperiod.

What Happens During Reversion

Once roots develop and the cutting begins actively growing again under long-day lighting, it enters the reversion phase. This is where monster cropping gets its name, because what comes out looks a little wild. The plant pushes out odd, rounded single-blade leaves at first, sometimes with unusual shapes that look nothing like normal cannabis foliage. This is completely normal and a sign that reversion is underway.

Over the following weeks, the leaf structure gradually normalizes. You’ll see three-fingered leaves, then five, then eventually the standard multi-fingered leaves typical of the cultivar. While this is happening, the nodes that were previously developing flowers begin producing clusters of vegetative shoots instead. Research on cannabis micropropagation has confirmed that floral reversion in cannabis is genotype-dependent and influenced by hormonal signals, meaning some cultivars revert more readily than others.² In practical terms, if you try monster cropping with five different cultivars, don’t be surprised if one or two struggle with reversion while the others take to it easily.

The reversion phase typically lasts three to six weeks before the plant looks and grows like a normal vegetative cannabis plant. During this period, growth is slow and sometimes bizarre-looking. Resist the urge to intervene with heavy feeding or aggressive training. The plant is essentially rebuilding its hormonal identity, switching from the reproductive program back to vegetative growth, and it needs time and gentle conditions to do that.

Why the Bushy Growth Happens

The dense branching that makes monster cropping attractive isn’t random. When a flowering cutting reverts to vegetative growth, the nodes that had begun differentiating into flower structures get reprogrammed. Instead of resuming growth from a single apical tip at each node, multiple shoot initials activate simultaneously. The result is a cluster of growing points where there would normally be one.

This is functionally similar to what happens when you top or FIM a vegetative plant: removing apical dominance allows lower growth points to develop. But with monster cropping, it happens at many nodes at once, and without you having to make any cuts. The plant self-branches. For growers who use screen-of-green setups or who want a wide, even canopy, this natural branching habit is a significant advantage because it reduces the amount of manual training needed to fill the space.

The Role of Stored Energy in Rooting Success

One reason flowering cuttings are harder to root is that the plant’s internal energy budget has shifted toward reproduction. During flowering, a cannabis plant mobilizes its carbohydrate reserves toward bud production, leaving less available for the kind of cell division needed to form new roots.

Research on hardwood cuttings of rose has shown that starch content in the cutting tissue is positively correlated with rooting success, while high nitrogen levels are negatively correlated.³ In chrysanthemum cuttings, the relationship is more nuanced: rooting wasn’t limited by total carbohydrate concentration, but cuttings with higher ratios of sucrose to starch in their leaves showed better rooting, reflecting stronger assimilate export from the leaves down to the cut site.⁴

What does this mean in practical terms for monster cropping? A cutting taken from a healthy, well-fed flowering plant that still has green, photosynthetically active leaves will root better than a cutting from a plant that’s been starved or that has already cannibalized its lower leaves. The leaves on the cutting aren’t just there for show. They’re the engine that drives sugar down to the cut end, fueling root formation. This is why experienced growers leave at least a couple of healthy fan leaves on each monster crop cutting and trim away only the flower material.

Trimming the Flower Material

Before placing the cutting in your rooting medium, remove most of the flower tissue. Those small developing buds serve no purpose on a cutting and actually work against you. The flower tissue consumes energy and moisture without contributing to root formation. It can also hold moisture against the stem and invite mold, which is the fastest way to lose a clone.

Don’t strip the cutting completely bare, though. Leave the uppermost fan leaves intact, or at least the largest ones. If the leaves are very large, you can trim them in half to reduce transpiration while still keeping enough leaf surface for photosynthesis. The goal is to balance water loss against the cutting’s need to produce the sugars that drive root growth.

Some growers also remove any tiny “popcorn” buds along the stem between nodes. This is good practice. Any tissue that’s committed to flower development is drawing energy away from the vegetative reversion and root-building process you’re trying to trigger.

Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

Monster cropping has a higher failure rate than standard cloning, and most failures trace back to a few repeated mistakes.

Taking cuttings too late: A branch harvested at week five or six of flower is deeply committed to reproduction. The further into flower, the lower the success rate and the longer the reversion. Stick to weeks two through three.
Giving up too early: A monster crop cutting that looks dead or stalled at day ten may still root by day twenty-five. The process is slow. If the stem isn’t mushy or brown and the leaves haven’t completely wilted, give it more time.
Too much light too soon: Intense light on a rootless cutting accelerates water loss through the leaves faster than the cutting can absorb it. Keep the light low and the humidity high until roots appear.
Overfeeding after rooting: Once roots show, some growers blast the clone with nutrients to speed up reversion. The plant can’t handle a full feeding schedule with a tiny root system. Start with quarter-strength nutrients and work up gradually.
Skipping the humidity dome: Without roots, the cutting depends almost entirely on foliar moisture absorption. A dome or enclosed propagation tray is close to mandatory. Open-air rooting works for vegetative clones sometimes, but flowering cuttings are less forgiving.

When Monster Cropping Doesn’t Make Sense

Monster cropping is not universally superior to regular cloning. If you already keep a healthy vegetative mother plant, standard cloning is faster, more reliable, and produces clones that are ready to grow without a weeks-long reversion phase. Monster cropping shines when you don’t have a mother, or when you’ve discovered a standout plant mid-flower and want to save it.

It’s also worth noting that monster cropping doesn’t work with autoflowering cultivars. Autoflowers transition to flowering based on age rather than light cycle, so changing the photoperiod back to 18 or 24 hours of light won’t trigger reversion. The cutting will continue flowering, fail to root properly, and eventually die. This technique is strictly for photoperiod-dependent plants.

Growers running tight schedules should also weigh the time cost. Between the slower rooting period and the reversion phase, a monster crop clone can take six to ten weeks before it’s ready to be trained or flipped back into flower. A vegetative clone from a mother is typically ready in two to three weeks. If your grow cycle is tightly planned and every week matters, that extra time may not be worth the bushier growth pattern.

Using the Technique Alongside Other Training Methods

Once a monster crop clone has fully reverted and is growing vigorously in vegetative mode, you can treat it like any other plant. Topping, low-stress training, and screen-of-green methods all work, and many growers find that monster-cropped plants respond especially well to these techniques because they already have so many branch sites to work with.

A common approach is to let the reverted clone grow out for a couple of weeks after reversion is complete, then top it once to further multiply the growing tips. Because the plant already has clusters of shoots at each node, that single topping event can produce a plant with dozens of tops. Pair that with a screen or net, and you can fill a large canopy area with a single monster-cropped plant.

Some growers take the concept further by monster cropping repeatedly across multiple cycles, cloning from flower each time. This is possible, but the returns diminish. The main benefit of monster cropping is the first reversion event, where the plant’s growth pattern fundamentally changes. Subsequent rounds of monster cropping from an already-reverted plant still work, but the dramatic increase in branching is mostly a one-time effect. After the first reversion, the plant’s architecture is already bushy, and additional rounds don’t multiply the branch sites as dramatically.

Cultivar Differences in Reversion Success

Not all cannabis genetics handle reversion equally. Some cultivars snap back to vegetative growth within a couple of weeks of receiving long-day light, while others struggle for a month or more, producing stunted, confused growth before eventually settling into a normal pattern. Research on floral reversion in cannabis has demonstrated that the process is strongly genotype-dependent, with different varieties responding differently to the same hormonal and environmental signals.²

In practice, sativa-leaning cultivars and hybrids with longer natural flowering periods tend to revert more easily than fast-finishing indica-dominant varieties. This makes intuitive sense: a plant that takes ten or more weeks to finish flowering hasn’t committed as heavily to reproduction at week two or three as a plant that finishes in seven weeks. The early-in-flower cutting from a longer-flowering cultivar is proportionally less far along in its reproductive program, leaving it more flexible when the light cycle changes.

If you’re trying monster cropping for the first time, take more cuttings than you think you need. A success rate of 50 to 70 percent is realistic for someone with cloning experience, and it can be lower for beginners or with finicky genetics. Having extras means you can afford to lose a few without ending up with nothing to show for the effort.

Stress and Hermaphroditism Risk

Any time you stress a cannabis plant, there’s a risk of hermaphroditism, where the plant develops both male and female flowers. Monster cropping is inherently stressful: you’re cutting a branch off a flowering plant, forcing it to root with no root system, and then asking it to reverse its entire reproductive program. That’s a lot to ask.

Cultivars that are already prone to stress-induced hermaphroditism are poor candidates for monster cropping. If a strain is known to throw male flowers under light leaks, heat stress, or irregular watering, it’s more likely to do the same during the chaotic reversion phase. Stable genetics with a strong track record of female-only flower production are a much safer bet. Once your reverted clone is growing normally, inspect it carefully for any male flower structures before flipping it into bloom. Catching a hermaphrodite early prevents pollination of your entire flowering room.